At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.
I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to 'respect' their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illite...
Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like.
What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence.
Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.
The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reaso...
The friends of Galtieri, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic make unconvincing defenders of humanitarian values, and it can be seen that their inept and sometimes inane arguments lack either the...
One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts a...
It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbid...
I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied t...
I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator - that's beyond my conceit.
On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that's none of his business), he very sweetly says that I 'might leave a wife, but not a friend.' Nice tr...
[Nicholson] Baker can't seem to get enough of the wisdom of Gandhi and cites at length an open letter he wrote to the British people on 3 July 1940. "Your soldiers are doing the same work of destructi...
Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you
I think that people's sexual preferences are a legitimate subject for humour, dirty humour if at all possible.
There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
Offered a job as book critic for magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth...
A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. T...